CASE STUDY

Siemens Takes a Global Approach to VoC

Siemens (News - Alert) Corp. is a U.S. subsidiary of Siemens AG, a global technology powerhouse that has stood for engineering excellence, innovation, quality, reliability, and internationality for more than 165 years.

Each division within Siemens constantly looks for ways to increase efficiencies and grow its customer base. Additionally, it’s important to know that the needs and wants of one division’s customer base could be entirely different from another. Siemens has recognized that the best way to go about this is to align itself as closely as possible to its customers.

The company has historically placed a high importance on its Net Promoter Score and once relied on a process maintained by its global headquarters in Germany to track growth. Having reached a point at which it desired to do something locally, the company sought a voice of the customer solution that could provide insights to a narrow range of data, but also had the capacity to expand across its entire enterprise.

To support its NPS efforts, Siemens was using transactional surveys to supplement additional customer feedback. After working through the cumbersome process of obtaining data from separate entities, Siemens sought out a solution that allowed it to pull the same data, but through a single portal. That led Siemens to Confirmit (News - Alert).

When Siemens first implemented the Confirmit Horizons platform in 2010 it was using the solution to complete four surveys, including one relationship survey, based on NPS and three transactional surveys. Today, the process has expanded greatly and now distributes approximately 25 VoC touchpoint surveys, spanning five different divisions of the organization. In the U.S. alone Siemens sends approximately 35,000 invitations each year to customers asking that they complete the relationship survey.

The solution helps to ensure customer feedback is captured, analyzed, and addressed quickly. After capturing the data, Siemens analyzes it to determine not only if the customer story aligns and validates with itself, but also if it can tie into a history of historic customer responses so the team can identify specific trends in behavior and experiences.

Additionally, Siemens uses the information to create customer case studies or buyer/customer profiles. Specifically, the organization has annual management meetings where they bring in high profile customers and share some of their comments from the surveys. Siemens has found that the customers are open and willing to share feedback candidly as they know it will foster change in processes that will ultimately benefit them.

As a result, Siemens was able to drastically improve its NPS. When Siemens Building Technologies first started using Horizons its NPS was in the low 30s, and since implementing the VoC solution it has increased to more than 50. The scope of the program has also grown every year, both in terms of the number of people the company surveys as well as the number of responses.

“We are very happy to see our NPS increasing every year while at the same time capturing customer feedback that we can use to drive improvement of the customer experience,” said Ken Haynes, marketing manager of strategic analytics at Siemens.

Each division has a different strategy for capturing feedback from customers after transactional interactions. For example, Building Technologies has three additional surveys accounting for 39,000 invitations used to gather specific feedback about service visits, projects, and product orders. Currently Siemens achieves response rates of 15 to 30 percent, depending on the survey. In a world of declining response rates, this is testament to both the strength of the customer relationship, and the engaging nature of the surveys.

As part of the company’s ongoing VoC expansion plans, the team has recently implemented Confirmit Genius (News - Alert), the text analytics solution, and is now able to gain a whole new level of insight into what is being said across different categories of the business. This allows Siemens to match the sentiment from both positive and negative feedback, analyze the true sentiment for the categories that suit its business, receive timely alerts about sentiment changes, and align those insights with key customer metrics. These results are shared with approximately 500 employees who have access to the dashboards updating in real time.

By prioritizing customer issues, the support can remedy the most pressing issues, while still ensuring the other customer concerns are handled in a timely manner. The ability to understand better the needs and wants of the customers has also enabled Siemens to quickly fix errors and processes that detract from the overall customer experience. Since implementing Confirmit Horizons, Siemens has seen a 5 percent increase in one of its key KPIs (likelihood to recommend).

“The Confirmit Genius solution brings our program out of one department and expands it across the business allowing us to improve operations,” Haynes said. “With text analytics and real-time alerts, the appropriate teams are alerted with information most pertinent to them at the right time. This allows them to focus on their day-to-day tasks and focus on VoC when needed and applicable to their teams.”

Following the success of its growing VoC program, Siemens Building Technologies launched a Voice of Employee initiative using Confirmit Horizons in January 2016. Siemens believes that this program has high growth potential, not only for Building Technologies, but across the enterprise.